You're absolutely right about Big Data being in the "trough of disillusionment". It is, and for good reason: people have been burned by the solutions they've tried.

What's been lacking up to this point is a cohesive data strategy. There needs to be a plan for asking questions, getting answers from the data, and then empowering executives to make data-driven decisions based on that.

SAP is the self-proclaimed leader on in-memory technology, but it has to show it's leading out there in the real world. Let's start hearing more concrete customer success stories and less hype about unspecified "never-before-possible applications" unmeasured "dramatically faster performance" and unverifiable "transformation without disruption." I'm talking to customers and hearing lots of good things, but there are realities (like the cost of new servers) and tradeoffs (like rework required to change apps and analytics) that SAP doesn't acknowledge.

Customers need to know they will get to that "plateau of productivity." Hype will deepen the dissolusionment while real-world case examples will help establish realistic expectations.

As InformationWeek Government readers were busy firming up their fiscal year 2015 budgets, we asked them to rate more than 30 IT initiatives in terms of importance and current leadership focus. No surprise, among more than 30 options, security is No. 1. After that, things get less predictable.